FSFE Newsletter - November 2009

November: another month full of activities and work to do for FSFE.
Among other things we launched the Fellowship grant project, fought for
Open Standards in the European public sector, had an excellent time at
the FSCONS in Sweden, and participated in WIPO to ensure that Free
Software principles are respected. To keep FSFE strong and independent,
we have launched our year-end fund raising campaign: Cooking for Freedom.

Thanks to the consistent support by FSFE and other organisations, the
World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) Development Agenda is
finally on the way to implementation. Karsten Gerloff, FSFE's President,
participated to the event in Geneva to help WIPO make use of Free
Software and Open Standards. In the meeting, WIPO's member states
discussed the mechanisms for monitoring the progress of WIPO's
Development Agenda in practice.

Fellowship Jabber meeting: Free Software in Education

On November 18, more than 25 Fellows joined a chat session to follow
Thomas Jensch's introduction to the FSFE's Education project. Thomas
talked about the general scope of the project and about specific
challenges to be met before bringing to full active status the project,
such as gathering information on the different European education
systems, and developing good strategies for being effective also at the
level of Universities. Afterwords, the Fellows asked questions and provided
interesting feedbacks to Thomas.

FSCONS 2009, Lindholmen, Sweden 13-15 Nov

The Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) which took place
in Lindholmen, Göteborg, Sweden was a great success. FSFE's Swedish Team
co-organised the event, and FSFE got a very friendly reception in an
engaging atmosphere of Free Software, hackers and technology people.
Martin Gollowitzer, deputy Fellowship coordinator, organised a OpenPGP
Card Workshop, Matthias Kirschner, Fellowship coordinator, and Andreas
Tolf Tolfsen moderated a workshop on the restructuring of our website.
Hannes Hauswedell presented a talk about PDFreaders.org. Finally, Adrian
de Groot and Karsten Gerloff held two sessions respectively about the
Freedom Task Force and FSFE's work for the public sector.

The Nordic Free Software Award to Simon Josefson and Daniel Stenberg

This year, Nordic Free Software Award presented during FSCONS reflected
the globalisation of the internet and the critical importance of network
services for all software users. The award went to two excellent hackers:
Simon Josefson and Daniel Stenberg. Simon is a member of the Fellowship
and was rewarded for his long-lasting and excellent work on the network
security packages GNUTLS and GNU Sishi of the GNU Project. Daniel's
contributions to curl, libcurl and many other packages were considered
crucial to the Free Software community.

FSFE takes action on the problems of the EIF v2

Early this month, FSFE commented on a worrisome leaked draft of the
European Interoperability Framework v2 (EIF). The current EIF serves as
a cornerstones for interoperability in Europe. The draft for the second
version is a clear step backwards. FSFE worked hard to prevent this
document to be adopted by putting pressure on EU members states and by
tracking the 'evolution' of the EIF v2 draft. We also published a press
release explaining why the current version is unacceptable for Free
Software and for the European IT sector.

The Fellowship grants

This month FSFE launched an important initiative to award outstanding
Free Software activists with Fellowship grants that will cover the
Fellowship contribution for one year. Three grants each month will be
assigned during the next 12 months. Everybody who is actively working for
Free Software but cannot afford the Fellowship contribution can apply for
the grant.

In the spotlight

FSFE calls for donations: Invest in freedom!

FSFE has been working for the Free Software community in Europe and
beyond since 2001. Donations have always been crucial to sustain our
work. They allow us to remain independent of any company or government,
in order to do what is best for Free Software.

In November we published a call for donations, so that the new year will
find us ready to take on the many and demanding challenges of 2010.
Karsten Gerloff published a letter explaining the reasons to donate to
FSFE.

This year, there is a special reward for the biggest donor of 2009.
That person will share a cooking session with two people from FSFE's
executive team. Software and cooking are both about creativity and
freedom, and we are looking forward to an afternoon or evening of
inspired discussions.

If you believe in our work or you benefited from it, if you believe in
Free Software principles and you want them to be defended: invest in
freedom!

It happened in the past

Launch of the Freedom Task Force

After many preparations, in November 2006 we finally launched the Freedom
Task Force (FTF). The project required sound planning and lot of efforts
before it could be announced. In short time, thanks to Shane Coughlan's
excellent work as the project's coordinator, the FTF became a key
knowledge centre in Europe for Free Software licensing issues.